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Impressionist versus Judicial Criticism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
We are told that Louis XIV once submitted a sonnet he had written to the judgment of Boileau, who said, after reading it: “Sire, nothing is impossible for your Majesty. You set out to write some bad verses and you have succeeded.” The point of this story for the modern reader lies not so much in the courage of the critic as in the meekness of the king. With the progress of democracy one man's opinion in literature has come to be as good as another's—a deal better too, the Irishman would add—and such words as deference and humility are in a fair way to become obsolete. We can scarcely conceive to what an extent men once allowed their personal impressions to be overawed and held in check by a body of outer prescriptions. Only a century ago an Edinburgh reviewer could write: “Poetry has this much at least in common with religion, that its standards were fixed long ago by certain inspired writers whose authority it is no longer lawful to question.” Racine tells us that the audience did not dare laugh at the first performance of his comedy Les Plaideurs for fear that “it might not laugh according to the rules.”
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1906
References
page 687 note 1 Article on Southey, Edinburgh Review, Oct., 1802.
page 688 note 1 Nouveaux lundis, t. iii, p. 28.
page 689 note 1 In T. L. Peacock's Crotchet Castle.
page 689 note 2 Causeries du lundi, t. xi, p. 486.
page 689 note 3 Nouvelle Correspondance, p. 226.
page 689 note 4 For Sainte-Beuve's earlier ideal, which would reduce the critic's rôle to pure comprehension and sympathy, see Pensées de Joseph Delorme (Pensée XVII). This passage has been appropriately selected by Lemaitre as epigraph for his impressionistic Contemporains. Sainte-Beuve's change to a more judicial attitude took place about 1848. For important evidence of this change see Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire, t. ii, p. 114 ff. Cf. also Portraits littéraires, t. iii, p. 550: “En critique, j'ai assez fait l'avocat, faisons maintenant le juge.”
page 690 note 1 Portraits littéraires, t. iii, p. 550.
page 692 note 1 Letters of John Richard Green, p. 372. Green's anecdote is perhaps not entirely fair to Taine's account of Tennyson as it finally appeared.
page 693 note 1 Abridged from the chapter on Taine in Essais de Psychologie contemporaine.
page 694 note 1 “Voici enfin Jean-Jacques, précurseur du xixe siècle, qui dans l'individu, c'est-à-dire dans le Moi affectif et passionnel, voit la mesure unique de toute chose.” Pellissier, Études de Littérature contemporaine.
page 695 note 1 Poetry and Religion, p. 218.
page 696 note 1 “Hay gustos que merecen palos.”
page 697 note 1 This is the full meaning of the Pali term Pamada. The opposite quality, appamada or strenuousness—the unremitting exercise of the active will—is the chief of the Buddhist virtues; this oriental strenuousness, one should hasten to add, is directed toward self-conquest and not, like the Occidental variety, toward the conquest of the outer world.
page 698 note 1 See Lemaître, Contemporains, t. vi, p. xi.
page 699 note 1 Vie littéraire, t. i, p. 111.
page 700 note 1 The appeal to the judgment of the keen-sighted few, as opposed to that of the many, first appears in Aristotle, who always assumes an ideal reader, whom he refers to variously as. The principle of universal consent as applied to literature, is first clearly stated by Longinus (, cap. vii).
page 702 note 1 See, for instance, the striking passage in Port-Royal (t. ii, p. 442) beginning “Un grand ciel morne, un profond univers roulant, muet, inconnu …; l'homme éclosant un moment, brillant et mourant avec les mille insectes, sur cette île d'herbe flottante dans un marais,” etc.
page 702 note 2 A definition of the word dilettanteism as here used (a use perhaps more French than English) will be found in Bourget, Essais de psychologie contemporaine, p. 59.
page 703 note 1 Mr. Saintsbury is naturally at his worst in his treatment of Boileau (History of Criticism, Bk. V, Ch. i). Some of the inaccuracies and absurdities of this chapter were pointed out in a review in the New York Independent (January 29, 1903).